"Board" Games

This is a head gun podcast.

Sorry for the delay, Rochelle.

Matt should be here any minute.

We can get started.

So, just as oh, it looks like he's here right now.

Speak of the devil.

Hey, buddy.

Sup.

What's up, dude?

Hi, how's it going?

I'm feeling pretty radical today, if I'm being honest.

Oh, hey,

that's great to hear.

Yeah, sorry, Ranch.

I was

I was doing a, I was riding in today.

I didn't have my car.

I uh decided to hop on the old skateboard.

You skated over here from your place.

Yeah, I skated over here and then I, you know,

they tried to stop me.

Who tried to stop you?

The people that like don't like it.

The people that don't like, there's like a lot, there's an anti-skateboarding sort of like bias in the community that it's that they just think I'm too cool.

I mean, this feels like a thing from an earlier era.

I remember the skateboarding is not a crime, but but like that felt like more of a 90s thing.

So the skateboarding has been pretty mainstream since the X-Games.

You're saying you got harassed by the authorities just trying to skate your way over here?

I got harassed.

I got haranged.

I got all sorts of

crazy stuff happened to me.

I was trying to do some flips and this old man was like, don't do that.

Uh-huh.

Just an old man saw you doing, attempting, I guess, like a heel flip or a kick flip and being like, what are you doing?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was doing a

heel flip.

Was he just in his yard?

Just like with an old guy just sitting on his porch?

Yeah, he was like across the street.

Uh-huh.

And he was kind of like getting really mad at me.

Okay.

He's like, don't do that.

We don't do that here.

Maybe he was worried about your safety.

No, I was wearing a helmet and stuff.

But yeah, so like I was doing, I did some of that and then I saw, you know, it was actually crazy.

Part of the way over here, I grabbed onto the back of a car like Marty McFly.

That's fun.

But I mean, I could see people being like, hey, that's a dangerous thing to do.

You're You're out on the open road trailing a vehicle without getting the driver's permission.

Yeah.

Well, and that's what, that's the issue, isn't it?

That as I didn't ask, if I had just asked, I probably could have, they would have allowed me to hang on.

I'm not necessarily, but I'm saying like, you know, if you were like, it's okay with the driver, then I think people might give you more of a pass.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt, are you, are you lying?

What do you mean?

No.

I'm just saying, it just seems like your story is kind of all over the place.

It seems like you're maybe just like want us to think that you skateboarded over here.

And I honestly don't even see evidence of a skateboard you certainly you mentioned a helmet i don't see where your helmet is where'd you stash that i i i left it i i left it on the board i left the the boards out it's it's uh no don't look out that window go go grab don't leave it outside the studio is out on the street someone will take it no i locked it you locked your skateboard yeah i locked it and you locked your you secured your helmet to the with a lock as well yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah how do you lock a skateboard

Okay, now who's like talking like somebody that doesn't know how to skate?

I didn't claim I could skate.

I just had some knowledge.

That doesn't know anything about skateboarding.

How do you know?

Tell me that.

How do you lock a skateboard?

It's actually really, really easy.

Uh-huh.

I guess I'm thinking you could probably take one of those U-shaped bicycle locks and put it over the middle of the board, and maybe it would be, you know, tough to maneuver.

You could just secure it to something.

Maybe you couldn't,

maybe you couldn't pull it past the trucks.

No, I mean, I have like a key fob for it.

To like turn it on?

Yeah.

You think a skateboard has an on switch?

No, no, I was testing you actually.

No, no, no.

Well, it's you know what, actually, it's crazy.

I'm actually embarrassed to actually bring this up.

I broke my skateboard on the way over here.

I broke it.

And it broke in so many pieces that I don't even have evidence.

It like shattered into basically like dust.

Matt, I'm just

going to challenge you here.

Describe a skateboard.

Well, mine's red.

Okay.

What about it, the physically, like its structure?

Um,

it's got wheels, uh-huh, and um

things

holding the wheels.

It's okay, buddy.

It's okay.

It's okay, buddy.

It's gone.

It's okay.

You don't have to lie to impress us.

It's gone.

Me and Ranch are your friends, no matter what.

You don't have to skateboard to impress us.

We love you.

The listeners love you.

You don't have to skateboard to try to impress everybody.

It's okay, buddy.

Shh, It's okay.

It's okay, buddy.

I'm peeing.

Okay, don't do that.

Okay, you're ruining a chair.

Don't ruin that chair, buddy.

Oh, wait, it's got a sticker on it.

What's a sticker say?

He says I don't know how to skateboard.

Fucking poser.

No!

Get his ass.

We stand on planks as they travel over surfaces as we discuss Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 and other board games this week on Get Played.

Wow, it's Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

It's time to get played.

I'm Tiger Weiger, along with Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Get Played.

As you might have inferred from her absence from our intro, Heather is out this week, once again.

Heather's gone.

But you know what?

It's not just me flying solo this week.

Matt is back.

I'm back.

Michelle Chen, our producer Ranch, is back.

Look at us.

We get three out of the four.

It ain't bad.

That

Hey, it's not bad.

75% is a solid C

in any class.

And C's get degrees as far as I'm concerned.

That's bad.

Man,

says that on my diploma.

I dropped out.

It is one of the funniest things to me on earth that

I do have a diploma.

And I will say, by the skin of my fucking teeth.

Yeah, we're back.

You were traveling.

I was in the desert.

I was in the desert in Palm Springs, do sort of annual trip with

some of my oldest friends, my brother, my wife, and we had a great time.

It was great.

Did you bring like a Steam Deck, a Switch 2 with you?

So this is what I did.

Yeah.

Well, this is, so I had alluded to this a couple weeks ago.

I had this standing date with my boys to go pick up.

Donkey Kong bonanza and get breakfast burritos, which we did do.

A lot of fun.

And then I immediately from there drove to the desert.

I was like, I'm not

doing this.

I have to do this.

And that's such a key ritual for any new AAA release.

Yes.

Like for, especially for like a Nintendo one, we really do go.

I think we've only done it.

We did it for Tears of the Kingdom.

We did it for Astro Boy.

There might have been a couple other stray ones in there that we've done it for, but we were like, we got to go for Bonanza.

We got it.

We have to be out there.

I also picked up my

Bonanza amiibo.

and thought about taking it with me to the desert

because I was like, I just got it.

I'm going to leave it at home.

Right.

And

my wife was like, wait, I really like this.

She like, she saw it in the box.

She's like, wait, this is really nice.

Yeah.

She was impressed by the quality of the amiibo.

Wow.

And I was like, I have other of these at home.

She's like, but I like this one.

Okay.

And

so, yeah, I took my Switch 2 and I took the dock with me because

that's like everybody sort of in the group.

sort of like brings like something that they're like contributing to the weekend kind of.

So like some of my friends are like,

They like to grill, so they're like, we'll like bring like stuff to grill and we'll do that.

I brought my freaking

espresso machine.

It's like a potluck for objects.

Yes, yeah, basically.

Like, I was like, I have this, and last year we went, and the coffee situation was dire.

Yeah, it was not good.

It was like we were working off of a single Airbnb Nespresso, and I was like, this is just not doing it.

Airbnbs and even Verbos

are so hit and miss in terms of like whether or not they actually promise on what they

deliver on what they promised rather.

You might end up with a kitchen that's like, you know, I have shit here.

I can't do anything.

So I was making, I was making espresso for everybody in the house.

Wow.

Every day.

And so I brought the Switch 2 doc and we were playing, got some overcooked going, got some Mario Kart World going.

And then while, because I get overstimulated and get too hot when I'm outside for too long in the desert.

So I would basically do like an hour outside, an hour inside playing Bonanza, an hour back outside.

Yeah.

And try to get people excited about watching me play Bonanza.

And nobody was very interested.

Even though I kept being like, you could break everything if you want.

But I did that.

And I also took my PlayStation Portal with me to play Death Stranding 2 in case I got tired of Bonanza.

But something did not happen.

I think it's pretty, we'll talk about it a little bit more in depth.

I think it's a pretty watchable game.

Because it's just like, it's so kinetic.

And like you were saying, there's so much, you know, essentially terraforming that you're doing.

I mean, look, I kept talking about how watchable it was.

I was like, man, I think you guys might like watching it.

You're missing out.

Yeah.

Watching me doing something.

Yeah, you guys have these music videos on outside.

There's a TV outside.

They had music videos on and like stuff.

They're having fun splashing around in the pool.

It's like a big, like, it's like a big sort of like, we go, we like, like, crush beers all weekend.

It does rock.

It was really, it was, it was a lot of fun, but I'm happy to be back in the studio.

Last time we were in Palm Springs, I guess it's a new city regulation.

If you're at an Airbnb, like a guy has to come in.

I don't know if it's like a guy from the city or a guy from Airbnb or just a guy hired by the people who own the property and like say like, hey, these are the rules of staying in Palm Springs.

Did you have an orientation from a guy?

It sounds like you didn't.

We didn't have a guy.

We did have a guy come and he was like cleaning the pool like the day after we got there.

We were sort of just like, who's this guy?

And he's like, oh, oh, he's cleaning the police.

But there was just like a, I mean, they have all these like little like instruction things like everywhere.

They're like, this is how this works and this is how that works or whatever.

I will say I was mad at the Airbnb because the TV, the TV that I wanted to hook the Switch 2 dock to with the HDMI cable was mounted to the wall in such a way that it wouldn't pull forward.

Oh, that's a little faster.

And the HDMI thing was in the exact middle of the TV.

Yeah.

And I couldn't get it.

And I had to then then ask one of my friends

with a more slender arm

to

reach back and

try to get it in any of the HDMI parts.

And it, which took some doing.

We did succeed.

That feels like I'm just reminded of being a little kid and my dad asking me to use my little kid hands to dig something out of some crevice.

Me, I was like, daddy wants to play bonanza.

I'm maybe out on Airbnbs.

I understand that you can get something that you can't get from a hotel, but it's just like, it's so unpredictable.

There's all these fucking hidden fees.

And like we were saying earlier about the appliances or whatever, it's just like sometimes you're not getting what you're paying for.

But like, I also just like, I kind of like hotels.

And I know you can't have that big that same group communal, hey, we're going to have in this one, we're going to be in this one environment and just kind of take it over.

It's not really the same thing.

If you're all getting your own hotel rooms, it feels a little more atomized.

But I just kind of like being in hotels more.

I like, I, I like getting getting the fucking points i love hotels i see this is the thing i'm like as i'm getting a little older i'm like i have to become a points guy you gotta be a points guy gotta be a points guy uh because like i love i do love hotels and i love i love a hotel breakfast i love like a hotel restaurant oh my god man

I fucking love there was a on our honeymoon we stayed at a we stayed at like a nice place in Kauai and they had like three great restaurants and we ate at one of them twice because I was like I think this is like the best food I've ever had.

It was so fucking good.

Uh, and it was, it was great.

And then, you know, of course, then we like for like lunches and like and other stuff, we would like just go like find snacks like in town or whatever.

But like they had some really nice like restaurants at the hotel.

And there was this guy there at the hotel who was like,

I've been here since this hotel opened in the 90s.

He'd been there like 30 like something years.

And

he was like the coolest guy ever.

And I told him at one of the local places that I, that I went to, and he was like, man, how'd you find that?

Wow.

I did a little digging.

He was impressed with my find.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the thing.

I could talk about points all day, but

get yourself into

a hotel ecosystem, one of the big chain hotels, and then just like, you know, orient your trips towards staying on their properties.

You'll

accumulate more points.

You'll get more status.

Whether you get like a co-branded card,

a credit card for that particular chain, or if you have a, you know, like a card like an Amex Platinum that is kind of like an umbrella card that applies to different chains and grants you different statuses, like that's a helpful thing you can use there too.

You're kind of double dipping.

You're paying for stays with their branded card.

You're getting additional points.

When you say umbrella card, it's not for the umbrella corporation.

You can get the umbrella corporation visa.

It's actually great.

You might get Laplaga.

You might get La Plaga, but it's worth it for that 30,000 point sign-up bonus.

And then you get a golden egg under your pillow every night.

That's a lot of fun.

But yeah, there's room service.

I can get a room service.

I remember when I was a teenager, I went on a cruise with my family.

I thought we were still talking about Umbrella Corporation.

Oh, oh.

So I was going to say, yeah, but the problem is the nemesis shows up.

But sorry.

Mr.

X chases you down the hall.

Here's the thing.

I would do that dip for 10 more minutes.

It's going to be fun.

We've got to move on.

Yeah, we got to move on.

But you know what?

I was staying at this hotel one time

with my umbrella points, and I came home one day.

Ada Wong shot this bell, and I couldn't go to sleep.

Oh, man, that's rough stuff.

It was just ringing and ringing.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember.

I had a situation.

I was staying in an umbrella corporation property.

Yeah.

And we were like, we were in what we thought.

They are nice.

They're very nice.

We thought we were in an elevator.

And the room is like closing in on us.

No fucking way.

I was almost like, why you're sandwich?

sandwich?

Oh my God, that sort of also reminds me of something that happened to me at an umbrella corporation property.

So I got lost.

Yeah.

And I was like, sort of walked, I was sort of like walking this like sort of like back area of

the hotel.

And I happened to walk by this open window.

A bunch of dogs jumped through and tried to kill me.

Oh my God, that's scary.

Yeah, but the bartender at that particular hotel was El Gigante.

And he makes a mean

espresso martini.

Yeah, I've heard this about him.

He's really good.

Actually, he sings me espresso.

Right.

A lot of fun.

He's fun.

He's fun.

Salazar was there.

He was doing the worm.

Was he really?

He was doing the worm.

You're sort of like, I haven't seen somebody do the worm really well in a long time.

Yes.

He was doing it like he crawled in the fucking dirt.

He was like really committed to it.

That's wild.

Yeah.

I haven't mentioned this in the podcast before.

Yeah.

But like, um, my college girlfriend was the president's daughter, Ashley Graham.

Oh, my God.

That's sick.

We went on, well, you know, with those guys, I wish her well.

You know, we kind of went our separate ways.

We went to,

we, we went to an umbrella

corporation, like one of their properties in Spain.

Yeah.

She got kidnapped.

No.

I had to call the White House.

They sent over Leon Kennedy to rescue her.

It was a whole thing.

That's.

I'm just sitting there with my thumb up my ass at the pro hotel by myself all weekend.

Yeah, no, that's that's horrible.

Yeah, it was rough, but it worked out all right.

At least we were on vacation.

It's true, it's beautiful over there.

It kind of sucks when something bad happens in general, but like if you're on vacation, it kind of lessens the voila.

It's true.

You're sort of like, oh, at least I'm on vacation.

I'm not at home.

If this happened at my house, oh my god.

Yeah, forget about it.

I was on an umbrella corporation property once.

Uh-huh.

There was this big lady walking around, and I was sort of like making eyes at her.

Wow.

And I don't kiss and tell her nothing, but things got a little crazy.

Which property was this?

Because I think I'm making a trip.

I think I'm going to use the remainder of my points, my dear.

Back to my cruise anecdote.

And just to be clear, this was not an umbrella cruise.

It actually was.

But it was cool because I pride myself i pack light yeah and so like when i'm packing when i was packing my suitcase i was like everything fits in in i have a grid in my suitcase oh that's nice so i kind of you know i had my socks in one section of it that takes up one piece of the grid and then i had the rest my pants kind of took up a big portion of this is that my issue with my grid suitcase is it's it's a really con like it is convenient i kind of drive myself nuts trying to pack everything in there yeah yeah

i'm like moving my flashlight um moving my um grenades yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah your your red and green herb but you'll get safe space if you just combine them.

I always forget to do that.

You got to just combine them.

And so I'm leaving behind my toothbrush because I'm like, well, I got to have these herbs

in case I have some sort of wound.

Then I'm buying it.

I'm like landing at the airport and buying a $6 toothbrush in a terminal.

So I actually had to file a complaint on the umbrella corporation crews

because I kept losing all these blue medallions.

Oh, boy.

And they kept acting like they weren't in the lost and found.

Yeah.

It was just kind of interesting.

But I would find these pieces kind of scattered around and it appeared to be shot weird yeah i don't know what was going on somebody was like going around shooting blue medallion yeah anyway my real cruise anecdote it's really weird when

you're like

Because you know, sometimes you're just sort of like a killing time.

So like, I'll go down to the, let's see what's what's over on the ballroom level, you know.

I love a show, you go over there, and then there's like like a portrait, and it's got like slots for three different gems

and then if you're just looking around you'll find like a red gem a blue gem a green gem you can kind of slot them some bitches in there and then all of a sudden it opens you got this whole different uh you know a passageway to explore i'm like what what who is this for like what whatever happened to a doorknob yeah whatever yeah whatever happened to a doorknob and also i did find this crown yeah huh

It had no gems in it.

And then

I got to find gems and put the gems in the crown.

That's what I'm talking about.

It's like all the time.

It's just like all these loose gems.

They're just scattered about.

It just seems to be like, you know, like, I don't know who put this here or why.

I don't know if someone just forgot about this.

There's all these gems everywhere.

I kind of thought maybe Adam Sandler was going to turn the corner, but he wouldn't never be anywhere near the place.

When I was a teenager and I actually went on a cruise.

UB Halloween might be.

You know, over the weekend when I was in Palm Spree's, I threatened to put it on

because I did it last year and it was a fucking hit.

I was like, look, I know it's not Halloween.

I think we gotta watch Hubie Halloween, I think.

Ranch, did you say Hubie Halloween was Mark's favorite movie?

Is that correct?

It is Mark's number one favorite movie of all time.

Hey, you might have a new favorite movie coming out because we're recording on the eve of Happy Gilmore 2.

It's possible.

When I was a teenager on a cruise,

I was just blown away by the all-day buffet.

Yes, me and my brothers, you know, it was like me and my three brothers.

So we were going crazy, just eating all day, just going nuts.

And then like we had dinner, like, you know, you do like the captain's dinner or whatever.

So you're like, okay, we better cool off.

We go, we had our own room because it was like the four of us boys and like our parents.

We're like, let's just like, they put us like in our own cabin.

And we got to our cabin, we were like, let's order room service.

And we all ordered turkey sandwiches.

That's fun.

It was, it was great.

And then we went to dinner and we still ate full dinner.

And one of the nights, I ate two dinners.

Wow.

Because you can get whatever you want.

I've never been on a cruise.

I don't think I could handle it.

You would hate it.

Yeah.

Just the idea of,

I know you don't like to feel like you're enclosed in a space anyway.

The whole vessel is one place and you're stuck at some point.

Right.

But it becomes, but it's big enough that it does sort of feel like you're in a small,

the worst city on Earth kind of.

But it's, they are fun, but I haven't been on one now and gosh, like over a decade at this point and have no desire to go back on one.

Right.

Too many things go wrong on them these days.

I heard all about this poop cruise.

That's pretty dire.

Well, when Mr.

X is the captain of the

ship,

he's throwing his hat around.

You don't want that to happen.

No, no, no, no, no.

No.

Anyway.

And you're like, who's the captain now?

And then,

God, if, oh my God, can you imagine

Captain Phillips is there just trying to enjoy himself?

He's like, not again.

Did we run out of steam on that?

Yeah, I think so.

Heather would have

been upset.

ED is more common than you think and simpler to treat than ever.

Through HIMS, you can connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options discreetly on your terms.

Through HIMS, you can can access personalized prescription treatment options for ED like hard mints and SexRX Plus climax control if prescribed.

HIMS offers access to ED treatment options ranging from hard mints to trusted generics that cost 95% less than the brand names if prescribed.

Now that's quite a savings.

You shouldn't have to go out of your way to feel like yourself.

HIMS brings expert care straight to you with 100% online access to personalized treatments that put your goals first.

This isn't a one-size-fits-all care that forgets you in the waiting room.

It's your health and goals put first, with real medical providers making sure you get what you need to get results.

Think of HIMS as your digital front door that gets you back to your old self with simple 100% online access to trusted treatments for ED and more, all in one place.

To get simple access to personalized affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss, and more, visit him.com slash get played.

That's him.com slash get played for your free online visit.

HIMS.com slash slash get played.

Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan.

Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality.

Prescription required.

See website for details, restrictions, and important safety information.

Guys, fall is here.

The beers are colder.

The football's back.

And the fits are getting layered.

But if you're still rocking old beat-up boxers under those flannels and jeans, we gotta talk.

talk.

It's time to upgrade to Me Undies.

These things are ridiculously soft.

Like, don't want to take them off soft, if you catch my drift.

They're made with micromodal fabric that feels like a cloud, but they still breathe when things heat up.

And just in time for spooky season, Me Undies limited edition Halloween line features festive prints, including glow-in-the-dark underwear, so you can bring the spooky vibes underneath it all, because that's what you want.

Your underwear to be scary.

Me Undies has a cut for every butt with over 20 styles in 100 different colors and prints.

Me Undies signature super soft micromodal fabric is breathable, stretchy, and unbelievably cozy, perfect for crisp mornings, chilly nights, and everything in between.

Whether you're layering up for a hike or lounging in flannel all day, Me Undies moves with you and keeps you comfy.

Want even more seasonal comfort?

Try the Breathe Line, designed for moisture wicking and anti-odor tech to keep you fresh throughout fall workouts or just a long day of pumpkin picking.

I love it.

They use sustainably sourced materials and work with partners that care for their workers.

Not happy with your first pair of undies?

It's on me undies.

With more than 30 million pairs sold and 90,000 five-star reviews, me undies are an essential summer must-have for every drawer.

I've talked about the undies, okay?

I've talked about me undies, and folks,

the me stands for me, mine, me,

I, Matt.

I got the undies.

And I loves them.

Cause guess what?

The old undies, I gone back to them one time in a moment of weakness, right?

Laundry Day, all my meundies are in the freaking wash.

And I put on an old pair of undies, and I'm just like, ow, ow, ah, I can't breathe.

Ah, it hurts.

Oh no, it stinks.

But with the me undies on, those are not my problem anymore.

Right now, as a listener to my show, you can get cozy and spooky for less with deals up to 50% off at meundies.com slash get played and enter promo code get played.

That's meundies.com slash get played, promo code get played for up to 50% off.

Meundies, that's comfort made for all.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but I was

following somebody around in the city and having a good time.

And then they locked me on a roof of a skyscraper because they they were a crazy person.

That's a true story.

And my cell phone didn't have wireless access.

So this next ad is specifically something that I could have used in the past.

Because if I'd had Wi-Fi, I could have called somebody.

But instead, I had no cell phone service trapped on a roof in Tokyo.

If you've ever been lost abroad or badly needed an internet connection with no Wi-Fi spot in sight, you'll understand what a difference a local SIM card can make.

An eSIM provides an internet connection wherever you travel and saves you money on roaming fees.

That's where Saley comes in.

Saley is a new e-SIM service app brought to you by the creators of Nord VPN.

Here you can choose from several affordable eSIM plans in over 190 countries and eight regions.

With a Saley eSIM, you'll always have a connection when needed.

Download Saley once and you won't have to install a new e-SIM for each country.

You can avoid scammers selling fake SIM cards outside of train stations and airports.

No more more wandering around looking for a public Wi-Fi spot.

With a Saley, you're always connected.

They provide 24-7 support, and you get a full refund if your device isn't eSIM compatible.

Download the Saley app in your app store.

Use code GETPLAID at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase, or go to saley.com/slash get played.

That's s-a-i-l-y.com/slash get played.

I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

Rent, you ever been on a cruise?

No,

the thought terrifies me.

Yeah, me too.

I don't think, is it for you, is it like just being adrift or is it more like the kind of claustrophobia of it?

Or maybe a little from column A, a little from column B?

Yeah, both.

Definitely being in the middle of the ocean.

Yeah.

Just.

for a prolonged amount of time.

Yeah.

And also I've seen the rooms on cruises.

I think I would have a panic attack.

They're very, they They can be pretty small.

And depending on where you are in the ship, I remember this one trip that I was thinking of.

Our room was in the middle of the ship, so it had no windows.

Oh, no.

That's rough.

I'm also that my, the other factor for me is, and I already mentioned puker, is like, I'm like a hygiene slash, you know,

sanitary sort of, like, I would say like I'm like a germaphobe, but like, I like things to be clean.

And like, it's one reason I'm not like crazy about like camping or the outdoors in general though I like nature and so I'm just like that it feels like a very unhygienic environment yeah they're

they because you know you can only be as clean as you are yes but then you open up a place like that to the rest of humanity and everybody else is fucking disgusting it's really yeah it's true uh it's it's it's tough i will say

I have two funny memories real quick too.

One of which was that my youngest brother had never seen a buffet before, like a breakfast buffet.

And And he was so excited because he was like truly like a little, little kid at this point.

And we like, we're like, well, go, just go get whatever you want.

He comes back with a mountain of bacon on his plate.

And that was it.

It was so funny.

It was so funny.

We were like, you can't eat this much bacon.

Like, you actually can't do that.

So, and he was very upset about it.

And then one of the things on the one of the days.

Because they kind of change out the stations every day.

Yeah.

They had a sort of like build your own sort of like

walk like sort of situation.

And I remember me and my brothers got like three bowls each because we were like, this fucking rules.

We were just like, you get the, you get like the raw ingredients and stuff, and then you give it to them, and they like stir-fry it in the walk.

And I was, I was like, I got to get another one.

That was so good.

The novelty of that at a buffet.

Like, I remember the first time I was like, oh, there's like an omelette bar, and this guy will make a fucking omelette for me.

Yeah.

Like, that's, that is really something.

I think

hotel omelette is honestly one of my favorite foods.

Wow.

I love that.

Hotel omelette.

I feel like they can be hit and miss.

When the cheese ain't melting all the way?

When they're doing it too fast?

Yeah.

Eggs a little burnt, but the cheese ain't melted.

It's also like, I'm also thinking of like, because there's sometimes, you mentioned hotel restaurants and sometimes we get, sometimes you get like the half-assed sort of hotel restaurant.

Or sometimes you just get like, they just have that, just the breakfast buffet.

And they've got, just got like, their version of omelets is some pre-made stuff that's sitting in a chafing dish.

And that's not, that's not ideal.

And don't hit me with this.

Sometimes they say omelette, but they actually mean scramble.

They got the big thing of scrambled eggs and like some cheese you can melt on there.

You know, it's not, it's not really the same thing.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

I want to move off of this.

Just yeah, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Don't move on, don't move on just yet.

Don't move on.

Vamp for a second.

Fuck.

Oh, God.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

You know,

you know who made me an omelette one time?

Who's that?

Albert Wesker.

Worth it.

Rochelle, we got some.

Rochelle, we got some new ranch lore, which

I know not new to, you know, some of the, the, the, the, the, some of your audience who, who checks out your, uh, your Twitch stream over at twitch.tv slash yard underscore underscore sard.

Not to the ranch stands.

Not to the ranch stands.

I was unaware that you and your friend Joanna have your own podcast.

We do have a podcast.

It's called The D-Files.

I listened to an episode.

I really enjoyed it.

I thought you two have such a great chemistry, but it's about Gugga-Gugga ghosts.

It's like a lot of paranormal stuff you dig into.

Yeah,

me and Joanna, we are friends from high school in Thailand.

Wow.

And actually, she's also an audio engineer at Team Coco.

just happened to also work with a map.

Yeah, we worked in the same office back in the world in my SiriusXM days.

And let me tell you something.

If you think Ranch is interesting, Joe's very interesting.

i say affectionately those are the best um yeah but we had a paranormal encounter together in high school wow and ever since then we've just been very fascinated by these things and ghosts and joanna has experienced a lot of things right and i've experienced a few things myself wow we we say that we're like believers who don't want to believe yeah Right.

And I was going to say, we're opposite molders.

Would you say that that experience you guys had together made you closer friends, or were you guys already friends before that?

We were already very close before that.

We did have a third girl in our little trio,

and she thought we were full of shit.

So

you cut her loose.

I thought you were going to say she was a ghost.

Yeah,

she lived in this well and she was always sweat.

Megan died 20 years ago.

My God.

Did you see Megan 2?

I didn't.

Really underwhelming.

Yeah, I like Superman.

Do you like that?

You like that Superman?

Man, I loved Superman.

A lot of fun.

Sort of a reverse Megan 2.

Can we tell you, speaking of Joanna, the episode I listened to?

I don't know if you want to relate again this year.

She told a story about having

what sounded like a legitimate addiction to eating quesadillas

and then getting this fixed by going to a hypnotherapist.

It had me yelping both quesadillas and hypnotherapists because it was so compelling.

Yeah, yeah.

I hear those things like do work though.

Like, I feel like I've heard several people be like, Yeah, I saw a hypnotherapist and I haven't like smoked cigarettes in like 30 years.

Right.

Like, yeah.

It 100% worked for her.

She stopped eating quesadillas.

But didn't it?

Wait, hold on.

Didn't it take two tries?

It actually took one try, but she had a group on for two sessions.

I saw it.

I see it.

Did work immediately for her.

So wild.

God.

I will say, just from listening to the episode, people should check it out.

People should check out the D-files wherever we get podcasts.

But I was like, a quesadilla addiction.

And then you hear her describing the details of this.

And it's like, oh, it sounds like this was legitimately disrupting your life.

Yeah, yeah, but also, like, I hear quesadilla addiction, and I'm just thinking about how often I eat quesadilla.

Oh, it's like, I'm, I'm borderline.

I call that my diet.

Yeah.

I, gosh, if I could see a hypnotherapist and tell him that, like, I'm like,

I can't have like sugar anymore, right?

I would just be a completely different guy.

I might do it.

I might see what a hypnotherapist can do for old wages.

Yeah, yeah.

Man, I think probably a lot.

I scare them straight.

What would you like help with today?

You, all of it, buddy.

All right.

We should be wearing new balances.

What's that?

We're both wearing new balances.

How about that?

Look at us.

The new balance kids.

You don't like that?

Maybe not the best association to have.

We're the new balance kids.

Adult men.

Do you struggle with procrastisaving?

You know, when you put off doing something that could save you a ton?

I used to be a huge procrastaver until I heard about Mint Mobile's best deal of the year that's ending soon, 50% off unlimited premium wireless for new customers.

Let me tell you how I procrastisaved.

I would reuse toilet paper.

Stop overspending with big wireless and cut your wireless bill to $15 a month when you switch.

All Mint Mobile plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network.

You can use your current phone and phone number on any Mint Mobile plan and bring along all your existing contacts.

Don't miss out on three months of unlimited premium wireless from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month.

But hurry because this deal ends September 22nd.

Look, cell phones are cell phones.

What are we talking about?

Your wireless carrier isn't, It's all the f ⁇ ing same, man.

Am I allowed to say f ⁇ during an ad?

Well, I just did.

And I told you I would reuse toilet paper to save money.

Think about how much you could be saving with Mint Mobile.

Quit stalling and start saving when you make the switch.

Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash get paid.

That's mintmobile.com slash get paid.

Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month.

Limited time, new customer offer for first three months only.

Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan.

Taxes and fees extra.

See Mint Mobile for details.

Has this ever happened to you?

You've been traveling abroad and you want to watch one of your comfort shows or perhaps even a sporting event.

And then because you're somewhere else in a different country that doesn't have that, you can't freaking watch it?

Well, I got something for you.

Nord VPN.

Protect your private data like bank details, passwords, and online identity.

NordVPN can switch your virtual location, allowing you to save money by purchasing flights, hotels, and subscriptions from other countries at a cheaper price.

So look, NordVPN can do all sorts of crazy stuff.

You can make it think you're somewhere else.

You're wherever you are.

You're not getting the best deal.

Switch to somewhere else.

They might have a better deal.

That's huge.

Protecting your data whilst traveling.

And yeah, I said whilst, and using public Wi-Fi, NordVPN protects you wherever you are in the world.

I have a theory.

This is why they haven't been able to apprehend Carmen Sandy Hago.

She's using NordVPN.

They'll never find her.

The NordVPN threat protection feature protects you from viruses, malicious malware, and phishing sites.

Unless that phishing site is fastpro.com.

No protection required there.

It's the fastest VPN in the world.

No buffering or lagging while streaming and stops your ISP bandwidth.

throttling.

ISP bandwidth throttling a thing of the past with NordVPN.

Premium cybersecurity for for the price of a cup of coffee per month.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

One Nord VPN account can be used on up to 10 devices.

Your phone, your iPad,

your mom's iPad, your laptop,

maybe even your watch.

Who could say?

That's not even 10.

You surely have some more.

Perhaps a proprietary browser on a video game console or something.

To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash get played.

Our link will also give you four extra months of the two-year plan.

By my estimation, that's 28 months.

There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee.

The link is in the podcast episode description box.

NordVPN, you heard?

Some days, your brain needs a vacation your body can actually afford.

That's where IndiCloud comes in.

You juggle the chaos, you answer the emails, you even go outside sometimes.

So, yeah, you've earned a better way to unwind.

Enter Indacloud.

Federally legal THC in the form of gummies, pre-rolls, and flour designed to turn hanging on into fully chilling.

So if you're 21 or older, head to Indacloud.co and use code get played to get 25% off your first order plus free shipping.

That's Indacloud.co code get played.

25% off free shipping.

Just a better vibe in your mailbox.

So here's the thing.

Look, I got sent some of this stuff.

All right.

I ate one of the orange soda gummies, okay?

Now, look,

I'll be honest.

I'm a bit of a lightweight.

All right.

I'm not out here blazing it.

I'm not out here.

I'm not over here,

you know, insert euphemism here.

I'm not doing any of that.

All right.

I'm not always doing it.

But when I do, I like to just chill out and relax.

It made me very silly with my friends, and

they all had a nice time enjoying me enjoying IndaCloud.

It sounds too smooth to be legal, right?

But it is.

IndaCloud's products are farm bill compliant, third-party tested, and made for grown-ups who want a buzz without the need to drive 25 minutes to dispensary.

And that's just a fact.

Dispensaries are 25 minutes from wherever you personally are.

That's just how it is.

More than 50,000 people already trust them because when it feels this good, it should also feel easy.

Whether you're chasing deeper sleep, better focus, or just some peace between your streaming marathons.

This is how adults get elevated now.

If you're 21 or older, now's your chance to float above the stress because Indacloud, see what they did, is giving all new customers 25% off their first order plus free shipping.

Use code getplayed or click the link in the show notes to claim your discount.

That's indacloud.co.

I-N-D-A-C-L-O-L-U-D dot C-O.

Use code get played for free shipping plus 25% off your first order.

Fill out their quick survey when you order to support this show and make your week way more enjoyable.

All thanks to IndaCloud.

Hey, enough bullshit.

Let's talk about some video games.

The question for the room is: what are you playing?

If I were to lose you,

I'd probably lose myself.

Oh, hey, hey, hey, everybody.

How are you doing?

Oh, wow.

It looks like it's Joel from The Last of Us.

It's me, Joel Miller.

And oh, wait, I'm sitting on something kind of crinkly.

Oh, hey, it's one of one of them damn comic books Ellie likes.

Oh, yeah, Ellie, she does, she does collect those comic books.

Yeah, she's always collecting these comic books.

And I guess also the comic cards later on.

The cards that correspond with the book.

Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't know about that.

Maybe honestly, I've said too much, honestly.

no i i know i know all about all kinds of uh ephemera

sure joel i i i imagine that the you've you've probably been dealing or reeling i should say from the shake-ups that have happened over at your the the tv adaptation of uh i guess your life i hate seeing my parents fight yeah boy it's brutal out there but you know what it's uh hats off to both I love both guys deeply.

They're both great guys, and I respect them and their work.

But you know what nothing nothing's gonna ever take me away from my sweet ellie and my in my in finding comic books for her you know yeah i mean speaking of which i thought this was a napkin but you might be interested in this hey it's yeah

it's one of them comic books i realized

but i i do want to speak on something real quick if you if you don't mind yeah please i'm here uh the resident evil 4 merchant yeah

actually called me in i'm

I'm temping for him.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, obviously the merchant isn't here.

It's nice.

And we had some Resident Evil talk by coincidence

in advance of where the merchant would usually make their appearance.

Not available today, but we're great to have you in his statement.

I'm always happy to be here.

You know,

I'm always just one phone call away from the RE4 merchant.

We go way back.

We're good.

We're good, good friends.

It's nice to know,

even though you're not of exactly the same generation that the two of you have formed a bond based on your iconography.

You know, it was, I actually got started in this business before him.

But he sort of took off and he blew up in this really fantastic, significant way.

And I was just waiting for my shot to get called up to the big leagues.

And now here we are.

Yeah, I guess if we account for that 20-year time jump, you would have gotten started before.

Right?

Yeah.

If I'm tracking the chronology correctly, you've got the cold open of, again, your life.

And we did that boyhood style.

That's right.

Oh, yeah.

You shot that in real time.

We shot that in real time so i it did happen so you know yeah sure my poor sweet sarah yeah my condolences those fedra agents yeah boy up to no good always up to no good but anyway i could talk all day about federal overreach

and how great it is and we love it um

wait joel i don't want to hear about your politics actually i don't want to hear this rural texas man's politics in 2025.

what do you mean i'm just a 60 year old man

i'm just some 60 year old white guy that has seen horrors upon horrors.

Loves guns.

I just love guns.

And any excuse to fire one off right through the skull of somebody that's standing in my way.

Anyway, the merchant told me I had to ask a particular question.

What are you playing?

Wow, well delivered.

I keep wanting to sing the song from A Star is Born, but that's a different guy.

It's a different guy.

Kind of a similar guy, though, if you think about it.

Wait, hold on.

What?

I thought you were wearing like a bib.

That's not a bib at all.

What is...

Interesting.

It's one of them comic books that he likes.

I will throw the question.

I gotta go.

Thank you, Joel.

I will throw the question over to Matt.

Matt, what are you playing?

I think I can answer that with two very simple words.

Yes.

Oh, banana.

Oh, banana.

I almost texted this to you literally today.

I don't know how we're not going to just say, oh, banana for the rest of the episode.

Because the first couple of times I heard it, I was like, that's going to get, that's going to maybe become grading at a certain point.

And then it happens 50 more times, and you're sort of like, actually, this is the only thing I got going for.

It's so graphic.

I love this game.

And so, okay, so I already talked about getting the game.

Yeah.

Bought it with my boys, Patrick, Connor, and Jeremy.

Had a nice time.

Took it to Palm Springs.

I'm playing it.

And immediately, I'm sort of just like, oh no,

this is

maybe, I don't know, the greatest game I've ever played.

It's so fun.

It's so great.

And it's like, you know, the Odyssey,

the Mario Odyssey bones are there.

And you sort of do feel that influence a lot because it's the same team.

Yeah, the thing I didn't talk about last week when I was giving my impressions, but yeah, it is the Odyssey team with a little bit bit of change in personnel.

So it's like the

probably the closest we'll get to an Odyssey sequel because I would imagine they'll go in a completely different direction.

Who could say at this point, gosh, when are we going to get a 3D Mario?

Anyway,

I would love it for the Switch too.

I'm playing this thing.

I'm loving it.

Because also, so I just think this is interesting.

In this game, well, in Tears of the Kingdom, In Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, the big new mechanic was you can build stuff

and like go ahead and just build a bunch of crazy stuff.

In this game, it's like, what if you could just break everything?

And I think that's just very interesting.

It's two sides of the different coin, but it's also the like, I do think that this is, I think we're seeing like Roblox and Minecraft's influence now get into like into these types of games for sure.

Yeah, because like I feel like, I mean, obviously, like you have stuff like the Hulk game that we've talked about.

Uh, the what's it called?

I think it was Ultimate Distraction, Ultimate Distraction, With ultimate distraction, him like with a

picture of like a naked lady.

Look over there.

She's like sneaking around doing stuff.

But

I think it's so fun.

And like

it's just, I also just love Donkey Kong.

I think Donkey Kong is just like one of the great characters of our time.

And

I'm loving the redesign.

I think it's great.

I thought I was going to be annoyed by Pauline singing.

And I know this is great.

I love it.

It's better than that, certainly.

But I love it.

And I love that it's just like you could, you could do it.

You could do this game just straight down the path it wants you to follow.

Or you could just spend a lot of time like what I'm doing.

It's just like, I'm just going to try to see how much of the stuff I can break.

And just break stuff.

And then that often will help you find like bananas and stuff.

But I'm also really liking like the little challenge levels that you find as as well.

100%.

They're so amazing.

They're so well crafted and so well done.

And the ones that are like in the 2D or, you know, I guess the side-scrolling style are a lot of fun also.

And I just think it's like,

you know, obviously it didn't launch at launch with the Switch 2, but this is like, I don't know, it's just like...

This was like, this is a great reason to get a Switch 2 if you don't have one, I think.

And I may talk about this again when we get to our main topic, but

so much was made about the PlayStation 2 launch and as the Switch 2 launched, we even on this podcast compared to the PlayStation 2 launch and its dearth of quality titles.

This alone makes it better than the PlayStation 2 launch.

Oh, yeah.

Because there was no game on this level that was available within the first

year plus of the PlayStation 2's existence.

And this game is kind of also in some ways reminding me of even Astrobot.

Like where I feel like when we were playing Astrobot, we were like, this game's sort of reminding me of Good Mario.

Yes.

And now I was sort of like, does Nintendo even got it like that still?

And of course they got it like that still.

It's Nintendo.

This is like the main thing that they're good at, this type of game.

And I just think, I can't wait to see how far, how many levels deep are you?

I'm a decent way in, but it made less progress the last thing that it would have liked.

But like,

I've gotten through some different biomes.

I've descended to a, you know, a certain depth.

I like that they keep talking about this president that I don't know anything about yet.

And I think that's just kind of funny.

I'm curious what kind of closure we're going to get on all the lore.

This stuff kind of gets trickled out.

But yes,

I feel like we're going to learn what that is at some point.

And

I do think it's interesting that Donkey Kong has been redesigned.

Pauline, obviously redesigned to be a little kid.

And completely retconned in terms of her relationship with Donkey Kong, unless we're going to get some explanation at some point.

Maybe the president explains everything that's been happening.

My biggest hope is that it is a human man.

And we get a Kojima-length cutscene explaining all the protocols that led to

Pauline being cloned

and her descendant being

like befriending Donkey Kong in order to get to Donkey

Befriending Cranky Kong's descendant so that that new Donkey Kong and her can forge a bond.

So I do want to bring out Cranky Kong.

Yeah.

Because he has a presence in the game.

You can meet him.

Not redesigned.

He looks like exactly the same as I remember.

I mean, yeah, I mean, like,

it's less overt than what's been done to, say, DK, titular DK.

It's just like

there's stuff you can look at that's really tangible.

And it's like, oh, I can see how

they've evolved and updated this character design.

Cranky Kong looks more like the Cranky Kong you remember.

Sure.

But I'm sure there are tweaks to it.

I'm sure if you side-by-sided the character models, you'd see some differences.

You have to get into the real, like, you have to hack the game.

You're like, wait, they gave him a huge hop.

Like, no wonder he's hunched over like this.

Can't stand up straight.

And put the hot coffee mod into

Donkey Kong bonanza.

Man, we can do an episode about mods.

Yeah, I've thought about that.

I've thought about how to do it.

I've definitely had some segments in mind with mods, but yeah, an all-mods episode would be interesting.

It's just so, it's such a sprawling topic.

And I know there's some people like, the only thing I play is like modded Minecraft or modded Stardew Valley.

Some of these games have such extensive modding communities

that you can just play these things endlessly.

I mean,

big naturals.

Right.

I mean, an iconic mod.

But also, I feel like also randomizers could be an episode in and of itself because that's a huge big part of the modding community.

And

was the Pokemon mod you were playing, was that a randomizer or was that more just like a

redesign?

A ROM hack.

So that was like its own thing.

It was like a fan-made game within the engine of

like Fire Red or something.

Right.

Gosh, I should get back to that, actually.

That's the thing, we'll just never finish all the games we want.

Um, but I won't even finish all the games I want to from this calendar year.

No, it's already I've given up.

I'm just like, it's fucking July.

It's like, I'm just gonna do it.

It sucks.

So, every year I start, I was like, hey, have a clean slate.

Like, maybe I can't go through my whole backlog, but the new games that are coming out, you know, I can knock these out.

I can focus on the ones that I want to pay attention to and dedicate my gaming hours to.

And you just, you know, there's enough fucking time in a year.

I am prioritizing this because I don't think it's going to take me like

100 hours to finish this thing.

Although I will say, I checked out the how long to beat on a DK Bonanza, and it is a little bit meatier than I anticipated.

Really?

Yeah, let me bring it up right now.

Do we think it's sub 30?

This one has, okay, so with a few more reviews, there are a few more reports logged since the last time I checked it.

And this has main plus side quests at 24 hours.

Okay.

So to me, like with my playtime and the, I feel like the people who self-report, self-select for how long to beat are usually a little faster at games than me.

I think that that probably puts me at about 30 hours of DK Bonanza.

That's still

a good chunk of time.

Yeah, and I'm about, gosh, at this point in my Death Stranding 2 playthrough, somewhere north of 60 hours, I think.

I'm not halfway done with it yet.

But those are the two games that I'm prioritizing.

But yeah, I think, I mean, I would like to,

I think maybe when we're done with Bonanza at some point uh

do like an episode about it because like i think there's just more to say about it and there will be more to say about it as we play more of it yes i just think it's like it's it's an astounding achievement i think i i've been reading about voxels uh

uh i've been reading about just like all the little things

i haven't even touched the art maker thing yet and that seems cool that people are just like making stuff with the which seems dangerous people might be making crude stuff with the with the the little clay that they can make stuff with in the game i mean i'm sure yeah the everyone's first thought butts and stuff yeah sure nasty shouldn't be i think i think we they're all there's all this talk about oh nintendo oh nintendo bricked my console because i hacked it no i think if you make something rude in the donkey kong bonanza uh art maker you should get your console bricked and they should be allowed to do it don't do that not to our boy donkey kong bricks for dicks

we'll be right back.

All right, we're back.

I've also been playing Bonanza.

I am going to sit on my thoughts because, Matt, I had the same

idea as you is that I think we should probably,

or I think, not probably,

I obviously have to loop in Heather, but I know Heather's playing it too.

But

I feel like we could do an episode about Donkey Kong Bonanza and talk about all of our

play experience in length, at length, rather, when we were all further into the game.

But yeah,

it's rad.

And

for what I expected to be like a,

I don't know, maybe Nintendo's equivalent of a double A game.

You know what I mean?

It's like, it's like, hey, this is a cool game.

It's not their main thing, but it's like, this is like a, hey, it's like a new mainline Kirby game.

I really like the last Kirby game for the Switch, but you know what I mean?

I thought it was more going to be on that level.

Well, that's actually an interesting point because because of how much I love that Kirby game, I should have known this was going to be a fucking banger.

Because I was like excited for this game.

I was ready.

Like, this is going to be great.

I'm just excited for New Donkey Kong.

Like, honestly, I was probably, I was expecting like maybe like an eight out of 10 or something.

And like, this is great.

Yes.

I was expecting, like, for me, I thought the ceiling on this might be like an eight, eight and a half out of ten.

I just was just like, hey, that's great.

I would love to have

a cool new Nintendo first party game that I can have some fun with.

But then I'm just like, oh, wait, no, this is like, this is a triumph.

This is like maybe a masterpiece.

It's so good.

Yeah, it's great.

I'll save my thoughts on that.

I wanted to have something else to talk about because I've also been playing Bellatro and no one wants to to hear me drone on about Bilatro again, but I will.

I have been incorrect.

I am curious.

I have been doing daily.

My Bellacho diet is I just do one run a day.

And I find like that's like a fair amount of time.

And it's like, but it keeps me from getting sucked in too deep.

And

weaning yourself down to one pack a day.

One run a day on days when I play video games, which is not every day.

So, you know, but I mean, like, that's, that's a, you know, a decent chunk of time.

I'm getting through the runs faster because I, I just know how to make decisions a little bit more quickly.

And it also, like, feels like slow progress towards my ultimate goal for whatever dumb fucking reason on Game Pass.

I'm now working towards the achievement where you get gold stakes on every deck.

So it's just, you just got to knock out a bunch of, a bunch of wins.

But another game I've been playing that I'm really,

really enjoying and.

will highly recommend to anyone who is a fan of this genre.

The Drifter was released on July 17th of this year.

This is a graphic adventure game with pixel art, developed and published by Australia-based small team Powerhoof and directed by Dave Lloyd.

It is this grim dark

horror feel to it.

It reminds me of the, to go back to the 90s, the Gabriel Knight games, and particularly the first Gabriel Knights game, which Gabriel Knight game, which also had this pixel art look as opposed to the second game, which was FMV and the third game, which was 3D.

But unlike the Gabriel Knight games, it has has puzzles that are straight ahead and make sense, do not require moon logic.

And

I find the story really engaging.

Like it's an incredibly high quality of writing and really expert voice acting, which I was not expecting.

Sometimes with indie games, it's like maybe that's a thing

that's perhaps a little bit more rough around the edges.

But no, both those things are absolutely, completely on point.

And the story in particular is

starts off.

You're in a train.

You know, I'm on board.

Choo-choo.

You're on the choo-choo.

But it's a, you know, you're a titular drifter.

You are

an unhouse guy who is riding the rails to try to, for, you know, a

bummer ride to go to your mom's funeral.

And

through

a series of events,

basically some mysterious interlopers end up attacking your train car with guns.

You bail out, and then you're on your way to an adventure that quickly spirals from there.

But

one thing I really like about it is it's really digging in on homelessness, which is a thing you don't really see in games

or honestly, even in media all that much.

It's like, I really like the movie Eddington.

I think

that movie was, I thought it was, I got to see it.

I thought it was great, but like, there's an unhoused character in that movie who's who's kind of like typical of like what you'll see that depiction being in art, which is like he's just like kind of like a babbling guy who's got some sort of mental illness.

Here it's like, hey, this guy is, you know,

a guy who works, but a guy who doesn't have a place to live and a guy who's, you know,

like like he doesn't like being condescended to.

There's a reporter character who's kind of like doing a profile on homelessness, who's like, he has some

a very early game sort of confrontation with but it's like it's like oh this is he's depicted as a whole person yeah and and I and just also for that maybe the player character it's the kind of thing of like this is the kind of thing that an interactive entertainment can channel feelings in you that you can't get from something that you're just passively observing and so I like that's part of it but also it's like

I think it's basically,

it's immersed in that world and showing like kind of like what a, how much society is stacked up against people who are experiencing this, but just amplifying the violence that is happening.

And so

there's some really horrific violence that happened in this game that seems to be perhaps science fiction-y, perhaps supernatural.

Perhaps these things are being interpreted as science fiction or supernatural

because of

just the way they're

being, because there's also possibly a real world thing that's happening.

But there is an element of that that is clearly supernatural, which is that your character

experiences death and then can relive those moments.

And so there's kind of like a, like a, a, uh, a, a, a minor time loop element to this.

Um, one of the scenes that happened very early on, uh, that involves your character drowning just like made me gasp with how horrifically it was depicted.

And then this widening out reveal of what was actually happening that I was just like, uh, holy shit, this is, this is a, this is a nightmare world.

Great aesthetics.

I mentioned the pixel art.

Great, like fantastic lighting in this game, really good soundtrack.

It's super Australian, which I like, just really, just as an American who has like fascinated, you know, has had a lifelong fascination with Australia, just to hear all the, these, these strong Aussie accents and Australian specifics, to hear the hood of a car called a bonnet, you know, things like that.

Yeah.

It's all, it's all, it's all a lot of fun.

And then the other thing this, this game has, and this ties in with how horrific it is there is genuine tension to the experience of

which is really hard to do in a point-and-click adventure game uh it it's it's not it it's it's not a sort of genre that lends itself itself well to feeling like you're legitimately in peril but this game accomplishes it um

you know, uh, through its tone and through its audio-video cues.

I really like the Drifter.

It is, as of now, on Steam, on sale, through July 31st as kind of like a

release Windows thing.

So if you are, again, someone who likes graphic adventures, I definitely think it's something to check out.

Also, I will say

a lot of the adventure games I've responded to in recent years, and I'll lump blueprints in this because even though I have mixed feelings about blueprints, but it is the sort of thing of like it fits the template of what I'm going to say, which is that they're games that kind of deviate from the classic graphic adventure formula of a character who's on screen as your avatar moving around from a location, and then you've got a bunch of series of verbs or, you know, you can mouse over things and interact with them in different ways.

They've been games like Case of the Golden Idol, where it's like, well, this is like a different way of presenting essentially this core gameplay, but

it's not the way that

you would play it in like a

King's Quest or a Secret of Monkey Island or Return of the Oberdin, a similar sort of thing.

These are games that kind of

have found new ways to present these gameplay concepts built around emergent storytelling and lateral thinking puzzles.

This one feels more like, again, like a classic Sierra or LucasArts adventure game.

So that's a big part,

but feels contemporary in the way it's presented.

There's a great like archive of various clues that you can look through.

And, you know,

as far as like the sort of hunt the pixel aspects of this genre, it's kind of muted.

Your cursor automatically changes to whatever you actions you can take.

Um, and again, all the puzzle solutions are relatively intuitive, uh, so it's really working for me on those levels.

Again, it's just like kind of feeling like a modern but also throwback game at the same time.

Uh, but that's the drifter, and that's what I've been playing.

I'm gonna have to check that out.

It sounds awesome, yeah.

I think it sounds like an interesting experience.

It's very much a Weiger game.

I think it, I think you would like it just because I think the storytelling is so strong, yeah, and the atmosphere is top-notch.

Uh, but you have to like, because it's, it's, it's all puzzles.

And so just like, it's all puzzles and dialogue.

So just keep that in mind.

Let's talk about board games.

Okay.

In quotes.

Do what we did there.

We tricked you.

Got you.

We tricked you, didn't we?

I thought we were talking about some Yahtzee or trouble.

Quote unquote board games.

You suckers.

They thought we were going to talk about fucking some settlers of Catan or some shit.

Guess what, bitch?

That ain't it.

We're talking about games where you're on a board.

And let's start with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4, which was released on July 11th of this year.

Matt, you were absent when recording in its release window, but we've been playing this game, originally developed by Neversoft and the Remaster developed by Iron Galaxy.

Yeah, I've been playing this a lot.

I've been playing it on my Switch 2.

Wow.

And which

it runs great.

It runs 60 frames.

It's great.

It's a great outing on the Switch 2.

I had OnePlus 2 on Switch 1 and it didn't run as great, but it ran fine enough for a portable version of it.

But this is a great game.

Honestly, I think Tony Hawks Pro Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1, I think, is my canonical favorite of when I've mentioned it in the, I guess, of the Pro Skater ones.

I have a great great affection for some of the games later on in the series, Tony Hawk's Underground 1 and 2 in particular, I really love, and Tony Hawk's American Wasteland.

But

3 is probably, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 is probably one of my most played

PlayStation 2 games ever.

Just because I would just play that game like two-player with my brothers all day.

We'd just go nuts.

And we unlocked all these cheats for it and stuff.

We're like,

I remember one of the cheats was like no no gravity or something so like when you'd go up a ramp you would just go so high up in the air and then like we would take that opportunity to be like just just like string together like the biggest combo we could before we landed and that was always so much fun to us um and so like our like that was really great um but i think the remake package here is is extremely well done i think it's um it plays great like it plays Because that was the worry.

The OnePlus 2 package was made by a different Vicarious Visions Visions made the first one, the first remake, and that was, but Vicarious Visions was subsequently acquired by Blizzard and is now Blizzard Albany.

So they work in Blizzard projects now.

Although it's also like an Activision Blizzard, it's like,

but whatever.

We wanted to get in their corporate structure.

Regardless, it got handed off to Iron Galaxy.

Iron Galaxy had previously made Rumble First.

They also worked on the Metroid Prime Remaster.

and the PC ports of the Last of Us games.

So, you know, this is the kind of thing that they have a lot of experience with.

And it sounds like they did a great job on this.

They did a great job.

There was concern because

there's a particular feeling you want when you're playing these games.

And like there are games that they've put out, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5, Tony Hawks Pro Skater HD, which is like a remake of, or you know, a remaster of 1, 2, and 3.

That was like a place.

It was like a digital only game on the PlayStation 3.

in that era rather.

And they're games that don't play well.

They don't have the feeling, the correct, like it just doesn't feel right when you're playing it.

Yeah.

It's such a tough balance because you kind of just want like a modern skin atop of the original bones, but that's not as easy as it sounds, especially if we're talking about, you know,

when you start dealing with animation frames.

Yeah.

You need that level of precision for the moves to feel the same as they as you remember.

Yes.

And but if it feels it they they nailed it like there was a like like saying like concern of a new studio taking on that task because it's just like a pain in the ass like but they they nailed it if it's a lot of fun they the biggest change to the the package is that in Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4

it was more of an open world the levels were more of an open world sort of like design like it'd be like each place was its own place But you could tackle any of the goals just sort of like whenever

Whereas like like, it used to be like a two-minute timer or whatever, like, or whatever, and that's present now, but they've changed the way that the goals work in this, where there's not like NPCs or like skaters you go up to to

get the goals, they're just sort of like in the world now.

Was that present in four?

Because I

for three and four is where my, like, I stopped playing Tony Hawk games.

I messed around with a little bit with Tony Hawks Underground, but my memory is that Tony Hawks Underground is when the NPCs started to become

the quest givers, but that happened in 1995.

That's like the first

dance with it.

It became like,

I think, more refined in the later ones, but like they had just like it was like pretty basic.

It was just like people kind of like scattered around, kind of just like standing very still.

And then you go and, you know, Rodney Mullins standing somewhere and be like, do a kickflip down this rail in Alcatraz or whatever.

Like, that's a bad.

That sounds like I've never played the game before.

Do a kickflip down a rail.

What's what's wrong with me

i mean you wouldn't have landed that trick is the thing no would have fallen on my ass

um

but gosh and oh my algorithm right now is skate is a lot of skateboarding stuff yeah

i'm thinking about getting the board and trying wow and learning some tricks have you skated in the past in the past i have but like not with any of her any like I've never done any like tricks.

I was just able to like kind of stay on a skateboard and like ride it around, but I've never done a kickflip.

Wouldn't it be cool if I could do a kickflip?

I mean, it would be cool, but I'm going to be lowered into the ground without ever having done a kickflip.

It'd be cool if I could do a tomahawk slam dunk, too.

That's not going to fucking happen.

But see, like, you might be okay with that.

I don't know that I am.

Like, I kind of want to die having done a kickflip before.

And even if it's the thing that causes my very death,

I want to have done it.

You could, you absolutely could.

I bet if you put your mind to it, you could learn how to do a kickflip in like a year.

Yeah, I think so.

Honestly, I do think if I give myself a year, I could do it.

I just am now worried that

I know I don't seem old, but

let's face it, I'm not as young as I once was.

No, it's true.

Father time comes for us all, and there's a certain point where it's just like, oh, jumping is just so much harder on my, you know, like knees and back than it used to be.

I just like, I can't do that anymore, you know?

Yeah, I like even running, which I used to do a lot, I still run some, but it's just like, man, it's such a pounding on the old joints.

I had batting practice last night on my baseball team, which is also a thing that could fucking wreck me for the rest of my life.

Like, the way I'm, my swing is bad, and I'm learning to fix my swing.

And the reason I know my swing is bad is that when I'm doing it, it hurts.

And it shouldn't.

Because I'm swinging the wrong thing.

I'm swinging with my upper body.

And you're actually not supposed to do that.

It's from the lower body.

Right.

And I'm trying to reorient the way that I'm doing it.

And it's actually very hard.

Because if you're used to doing something wrong for a long time, you'll continue to do it that that way until you just, I guess, magically start doing it correctly.

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to change it.

This happens all the time in the NBA.

A player will have what is called like a broken jump shot.

And they'll have to learn, like, completely relearn the mechanics.

And it's tough because they've been athletic enough and skilled enough to, you know, get like get to the NBA.

They've been that good at everything else, but actually their shooting is such a, you know, bottleneck for them to be able to send to the next level that they've got to like just completely remake their form

at a relatively late stage in their career.

It's got to be so, I mean, it's so tough mechanically to do something different than you've been doing it your whole life.

It would be like trying to, at this point in my life, learn to write left-handed.

Because it's something that you technically could do, I guess.

Yeah.

But it's just not intuitive at all.

Matt, you should just come skate with me and work.

Oh, I would, Ranch.

I would love it.

I would love.

That's honestly.

Please, let's set it up because I need people who are going to be nice to me and help me.

Rochelle, did you do a kickflip?

No.

How long have you skated?

I started when I met Mark.

Oh, wow.

So I was also 29 when I started.

An adult skateboarding learner.

I did get hurt a lot.

Yeah.

And I saw Mark's arm come out of his socket.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I think I'm going to go with somebody else.

But it can be done.

It can be done.

It can be done.

I mean, the thing is, like, my algorithm is like old guys like us doing it.

I'm sort I think it could do it.

It seems like a thing that you could just learn to do.

But all that aside, I will say, I haven't really gotten into the Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 in this package.

I'm still kind of messing around in 3.

And 3 is really, really fun.

I remember really liking 3.

It's great.

I wish that some of the secret characters from those days were in it, like Darth Maul and stuff, but that's a licensing nightmare.

And

the other licensing issue I saw is that

a whole bunch of the original original music tracks are missing in this game, which is a little bit of bumming.

Yes, they could not secure the rights to, I think, the most expensive song to license, which is ACDC's Thunderstruck.

Right.

They couldn't make it happen this time.

A miracle they had it the first time.

But they added some new songs to

the soundtracks, which is great.

One of my favorite artists, Jeff Rosenstock, has a song from his album, Hell Mode, called

Head in the Game, and it's great.

I love that song.

And

I think overall as a package it's great and it might even exceed how I feel about the OnePlus Two remake because I think that's a home run and I'm having a blast with this one.

And I'm just looking forward to more just playing it a little bit more and playing and getting into the force of the four of it all because four I didn't spend that much time with, honestly.

I like skipped over four because

you mean when you were younger?

Yeah, when I was younger, I had skipped over it because I was just kind of like, oh, like,

honestly, maybe I just couldn't, you know, buy it.

I was a kid.

Yeah.

And like, my parents probably were not going to buy me another one if they had just gotten me one too.

The fourth entry is also probably

where people are starting to get burned out on the concept to some degree.

But then like you do Tony Hawk's Underground, that seems like so completely different and new that then I'm like, okay, I'm back in on this.

And then

Underground 2 comes out and you're like, okay, now this has jackass stuff in it and that's my favorite shit on earth uh and so and that stuff um i'm sure has

aged in an interesting way

um

we did watch jackass 2 over the weekend uh in palm springs and me all my friends were just laughing our fucking ass cloud it was so good but there's all i mean there's so many different types of boards in games nick that it's true do you know there was a a kelly slater pro surfer game that I played

as a teenager as well?

I remember Kelly Slater's pro surfer, which I never got into, and I remember that was meant to be the counterpart of kind of like, hey, we got Tony Hawks Pro Skater movie to Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer will be the next big thing.

It didn't really take off.

Partly because just from a gameplay standpoint, surfing is a little bit harder to,

you know,

to make it to...

to give as many diverse sort of gameplay

sort of experiences, to have as many mechanics as you can with skateboarding because it's just a little bit more extensible.

But yeah, I've got a bunch of sharks out there.

We got to look out for the sharks.

How do you want to do this?

Do you want to just sort of like bounce back and forth?

Should we kind of talk through things chronologically?

Because I got some entries too I want to talk about.

Let's get some of the, I guess, yeah, let's bounce back and forth.

Going back in time,

a game I remember.

Yeah, feel free to make the Wayne's World doodly-doos if it helps you.

Unless we can't use it, unless we can't secure the rights.

Spotify takes down the episode.

Did you see some desists from Mike Myers and Dana Carvey?

The

game I remember as a kid was an arcade game developed by Atari called 720.

And it had a little degree symbol, but I always remember it just being called 720.

I remembered it as being a game you played with a trackball, but I guess it was a stick.

Maybe there was a different

game you play arcade cabinet, skateboarding arcade cabinet you played with a trackball, but whatever it was, I couldn't track it down and it was not 720.

But 720 was a cool sort of like very early on attempt at making, again, an 80s sort of version of

skateboarding, which was much less aerial, recreated in video game form.

I've got a little footage here, Matt, which I can show you.

Yeah.

Just so you can kind of see the sort of the, what this looked like in the era.

But yeah, this is kind of like an open skate sort of vibe.

There's a bunch of different like types.

There's like a half pipe, which you can see there.

And I actually think that, I mean, that's like the art animation is pretty damn good from 1986.

Yeah.

And then wow, you won $50 in that.

Yeah, and then you had these ones, which are more of a like a free skate, a sort of a freestyle park that you can kind of go through.

I don't know if they still do this in any competitive skating, if they still do like slaloms or downhill or whatever.

But it feels like kind of archaic to have this represented.

But there were versions of this as well and some of the games' various modes.

But I remember it being very cool to play and also it it just feeling at a time when skateboarding was such a new concept.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm very little.

I'm like single digits age.

I'm like, I'm like a little boy just remembering this being like a cabinet that you could go up and look at.

Big lollipop.

Yeah, exactly.

Retained as my signature to this day.

Let me say.

If you could take down a big lollipop in this day and age, I'd get sick.

It'd be bad, right?

I'd get really sick to my stomach.

I barely want like a normal normal size lollipop I'm being honest.

I gotta throw away a stick.

Look at this cabinet.

Isn't that rad?

That is really multicolored with the kind of the checkerboard too.

Yeah, the colors are really nice.

Yeah, and honestly, like

just to even just go back to the the art style of that that does look legitimately like really cool still like if that came out like as like a throwback sort of like indie game you'd be like this is amazing I'll roll from this right back into another game of that era that I remember more vividly because I actually had this game on my dad's Commodore 64 and played a much better version on my friend's Atari Lynx a few years later.

1987 game from Epix called California Games.

You know, you and I are lifelong SoCal surfer dudes.

That's right.

California is a big part of our identity.

This is like a mini-game collection that had a skateboarding game on a half pipe, also had a surfing game.

So it had a little, well, it had both, but it also had a bunch of like other games like Hacky Sack and Frisbee.

I remember really liking the Hacky Sack game.

That seemed good.

What a fucking dumb thing to simulate, but it was just, there was just something about being able to, you know, kick a little bag in the air a bunch.

Yeah, keeping something in the air.

Yeah.

It's just, it's a timeless game.

But again, this was, this was the one, this was a relatively, you know, like, this was a cruder representation of skateboarding, and it was just part of the collection.

But yeah, there was the half pipe going up and back and doing tricks.

And I don't know if I, you know what?

I've never, like, I did skateboard briefly as a child.

I never got to go on a half pipe.

You ever been on a half pipe?

No, that's very scary to me.

Ranch, you ever been on a half pipe?

Yeah, I can drop in.

Drop in.

You can drop in?

Yeah.

Wow.

What's it like?

It's scary.

It's teasing.

It's always scary.

Yeah.

But as a kid, I always thought it would be like the coolest fucking thing to get a bunch of momentum and then go up the other side and like flip around and come back down.

Would you say I've been on like a big one?

Yeah, sure.

Like small one.

How long did it take you to learn to drop in?

Probably

a month.

A month.

Okay.

And so from that month onward, would you say your success rate for dropping in and not like eating shit

is gone up?

Like, do you, can you successfully drop in every time and be like, okay, I'm like on?

Or are you doing it sometimes and you're like falling on accident?

I would say once you know how to drop in, it's usually close to 100% success rate.

That's huge.

Okay, great.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Once you drop in, you won't drop out.

Nick, do you want to come skateboarding with me or anything tomorrow?

Hi, fellow skaters.

I'm Weiger.

Your head falls clean off.

I got a couple.

Yeah.

Because we're talking a lot of skateboards, and I actually mentioned a surfboard earlier.

There's a lot of snowboarding games, too.

There are a lot of snowboarding games, and I do have some on my list, but

it's interesting.

I feel like, again, going back to what I was saying earlier, there's something about skateboarding that I think that just, it's a little bit easier to make free roaming.

Snowboarding has got to be downhill surfing.

You're kind of set on a wave.

There's not a lot, not a ton you can do.

Whereas skateboarding just has a little bit more

possibilities in terms of gameplay.

Well, to speak on skateboarding, then real quick, because

there are competitors to the Tony Hawk franchise.

Yes.

Right.

So you have

the main competitor being the skate franchise, which is

it's coming back.

Yeah, I've never played the skate games and I've never played session, which is the other, which is, I guess, the super hardcore sim skateboarding games.

Session is supposed to be like, I mean, I was going going to say, like, the most accurate, but it's also you're doing it with a video

controller.

It's like, it's the most, I guess, meticulous with

how you

like can control the

like the player's feet in the board and stuff.

Right.

And so, and so that seems interesting to me.

I have not messed with that.

I have messed with skate.

I've messed with skate actually very recently.

Wow.

I like downloaded skate 3 off of Game Pass and was playing it on my Xbox for a little while.

And there's a fun tutorial with Jason Lee playing a fun character.

It's great.

He's a great skateboarder also.

Yeah.

And which is always just kind of funny to learn.

That he started as a skateboarder and then became an actor.

Yeah.

And then there's like other people, like Tim Robinson's a great skateboarder, which is like just funny information.

And, but it's so, so skate is like less arcadey, but also has ridiculous stuff in it too.

Like, I feel like a lot, I see a lot of videos of people launching their character like into like ravines and like doing like as many flips as they can and just like falling.

And it's just like, that's all I see of it.

It's so funny.

But you can do like crazy stuff in that too, but it's that one, I think, sort of prides itself on being a little bit more realistic than the arcadey Tony Hawk games.

But I like, I like it to be a little more silly and fun.

Yeah, for sure.

Like there's like moves in like the Tony Hawk games where like in the newest one, you can unlock the doom guy, right?

You can unlock the doom slayer, and he has his own move sets.

He has like a chainsaw thing that he does, and like a grappling hook thing that he like pulls somebody's intestines in or whatever.

And like, that's just good.

That's just good fun.

And obviously, it's not real at all.

I hope, right?

I hope that's not real.

I don't think it's real.

I don't think they can get away with making that real.

I hope not.

Yeah.

Someone tell us if it is real.

If it's real, let me know.

Michelangelo's in the game.

But that makes sense because he's a party dude.

Right.

So those ones are more realistic.

There is a game that I've messed around with a little bit.

Are you familiar with the Ollie-Ollie franchise at all?

I've just heard of it.

I've never played any of them.

It kind of reminds me a little bit of what you were showing me in 720, where it's like kind of like a side-scrolling, at least my experience of my memory of it is this, that it's like you're on a skateboard and it's like a sort of digital, well, not digital, I'll call digital, but a pixelated

character that you're sort of going through and doing like little flips and tricks and stuff stuff like that.

Did you ever mess around with the Simpsons skateboarding?

Since we're the two Simpsons guys, let me tell you something.

Yeah, it sucks.

It's not good.

It's very bad.

There are some great Simpsons games, of course, but none of them involve them doing something else.

Yeah.

It's always like,

you know, like the Simpsons beat-em-up arcade game, of course, the Simpsons Hidden Run and Simpsons Road Rage are all great, but Simpsons wrestling, Simpsons doing anything else, usually not good.

Right.

But I mean, like most licensed games.

But yeah, so there's a lot of bad Simpsons games out there.

There is a pretty good one.

There is a good licensed skateboarding game.

I don't know if it's like...

I remember renting it when I was a little kid and enjoying it because it had songs that I was used to listening to and stuff.

And this is Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure.

And it's basically a Tony Hawks Pro Skating.

It's exactly like the same mechanics as Tony Hawks Pro Skating.

Yes.

But in like a Disney environment, you can be like Woody.

That sounds fun.

You can be Woody skating like in Andy's room.

Yeah.

That's just good shit.

That's that's a lot.

You can be Tarzan, young Tarzan.

I love that.

He's practically skateboarding.

He practically is skateboarding, isn't he?

And one of my favorite, I have an arcade cabinet to mention, Top Skater.

Yes, Top Skater, this was a 1997 Sega arcade game built on Model 2 hardware, and where you sit on a skateboard to control it, directed by Kenji Kano, who would later make Crazy Taxi.

Wow.

And

also this little factoid from its Wikipedia page.

While developing the original Tony Hawks Pro Skater, the Neversoft development team spent lunch breaks at a bowling alley near the studio where they would play and study from Top Skater in the arcade.

It's a really fun game.

Yeah.

I really, I liked it.

I sunk a lot of quarters into that.

I think they had one at the Chuck E.

Cheese that I went to

for a long time.

Yeah, this is a guy doing, getting with an S rank run on this that we're watching in studio.

But just like,

it's for to describe it for people who have not seen this cabinet, or to jog your memory if you have, there was basically a skate, a mounted skateboard with a little bit of give that you would stand on and that you could manipulate to do like aerial maneuvers, but of course, you're not actually doing them.

And then you could also lean to, you know, affect your direction.

But then, of course, there's these dance, dance, revolution, you know, guide that you can hold on to for dear life so you don't lose your balance as you go.

But it was a very, like, just a very cool experience.

And one of those things is just like, oh, this is why we go to arcades.

This is something I can't do at home.

Yeah, something now that I can't imagine ever touching with my bare hands ever again.

But I had great enjoyment with that game.

That one is, yeah, a lot of fun memories on that thing for sure.

And also, like, I remember being a kid and not having any quarters and and like kind of standing on it and pretending i'm doing it anyway you know well that's the thing it's like like that was like or like a you know you'd have a game like afterburner with the with a big joystick or any of those ones that you could sit in any of the driving sims you could sit in um where it's just like oh just i can just be in this thing yeah and i could just like i don't even have to put any tokens in i can just like mess around with it yeah it's like a big toy yeah i that was a Top Skater was cool.

And

it's interesting they haven't really, I don't know if anyone's really made anything that that on that same level.

I mean, certainly that the Tony Hawk game that had a Tony Hawk's ride?

Tony Hawk's ride didn't really accomplish that at home, but it feels like that's like a natural sort of thing that should just be at Dave and Buster's, the equivalent of like a modern top star.

I remember it was like at like an E3 or something like that where he was like debuting the board.

Yes.

And there's this.

I kind of feel like in the clip, he's like such a wholesome guy and like, I love him.

I love him.

Yeah.

And I'm such a fan of his.

You can almost tell a little bit that he's kind of like, Yeah, like, I don't know what this

is gonna work.

Like, because he's presenting it almost like Steve Jobs presenting an iPhone kind of, and he's like, Yeah, you can, like, write, you can like ride this at home.

Like, it kind of feels like he's kind of like, I don't really know about this.

Uh, okay, we can't mention Tony Hawk without me once again telling the story of me getting to meet him when he guested on the Comedy Bang Bang TV show.

And there was a bit where he had a stunt double for his talk show-related stunts,

And that was played by me because I was the closest to his physical proportions.

And so I got to wear duplicates of Tony Hawk's clothes to be a stunt guy.

He was a lovely man.

He was an absolute prince.

This is all I hear about him.

And all I can say is, please come on our show.

That's so fun.

Did you like the clothes?

Did you like the clothes?

I mean, they felt cool.

There's always like in a situation like that, in particular, too, where you're sort of like being dressed by like a costumer or something.

You're like, these are not clothes that I'm going to wear normally.

So you kind of get to be like a different guy for sure.

And that's always so fun.

A lot of fun.

Yeah.

Going back in time a little bit, this is not a game that I

go ahead and again, again, invoke the Wayne's World sound effects.

If we're not going to get DMCA'd,

this was not a game that I maybe even played.

I just remember.

There was a game called Skater Die that was multi-platform in the 80s.

And this is, again, like sort of a mini-game collection with a bunch of different skate events.

But the one thing I remember is that there was a guy in this game who was like kind of their mascot,

a man with a purple mohawk, whose name, I guess, was Rodney Recluse, who'd say quips between rounds.

Do you remember this guy?

I've never seen him before, but I'll die for him.

He's old as shit.

He's got a tattoo.

He's got a purple mohawk.

And I guess his face is modeled off of Rodney Dangerfield, which is why he looks like this.

I tell you, my skateboards get no respect.

Everyone gets mad at me, and I push Mongo.

He says, quit your yakin and go practice here.

We just have a bunch of shit that he would say.

But the one that I spent a lot more time with and actually owned was a game called TNC Surf Designs Wood and Water Rage.

Now, Matt, as OK, I could maybe be too young for this, but you may remember the TNC Surf Company.

Sure.

That's familiar to me.

They had a cast of characters called De Boys.

I'm in.

Who were

this array of

various

archetypes?

There's a cool guy called Joe Cool.

There's a tiki guy called Tiki Man.

There's a cat called Cool Cat.

And then my favorite,

the cool gorilla, Thrilla Gorilla.

That's really good.

Yeah, the original surfing gorilla.

And

I guess they were actually a surfboard brand originally, but I just knew the t-shirts.

And I just loved the t-shirts when I was a little boy in elementary school.

I thought they were so cool.

And

they made a game of that

had a skateboarding game where you could control either Joe Cool or Tiki Man, and a surfing game where you could pick either Cool Cat or Thriller Gorilla.

Now, though, again, I love Thriller Gorilla, the surfing game just had a lot less to it than the skateboarding game.

So I spent a lot more time playing as Tiki Man in the skateboarding game, which was more of just like a side-scroller.

I can do like an endless runner, though I think there were discrete levels, but it's just like, how long can you go without dying?

And you're jumping over obstacles and ducking over and weaving between them.

And

it was like, I remember it being super fun.

That sounds awesome, but the t-shirt thing is reminding me of

the big dog t-shirts.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm sort of thinking, should we get some?

We should.

And also, that guy should have a game.

Why didn't that happen?

What about a body sort of like adult animated cartoon?

That sounds like fun.

We kind of like

not like Bojack Horseman, but like kind of like that.

Maybe or not where he's like all sad.

Maybe he's just like a party guy.

He likes to hang out.

I guess TNC surf designs still exists.

Oh, cool.

Here's a cast.

Here's a shot of the boys.

You can maybe see there's Thrilla Gorilla right there.

TT Man.

The big dog's out.

Yeah.

Thriller Gorilla gets his own show.

Straight to series.

Thriller Gorilla is amazing.

He's fucking awesome.

Okay, let's should we talk to

You're going to do it early.

Should we talk about snowboarding a bit?

Yes, there is a surfing game I do want to go back to real quick.

Try to find the name of it real quick.

Oh,

of course it's called.

For my little playdate, which is the handheld little device that I have with the crank

developed by Panic.

This game called

Whitewater Wipeout.

It's a little surfing game there.

Wow.

And you use the crank to manipulate the surfboard.

And I think,

for my money,

a better better surfing game than Kelly Slater's pro surfer because it's sort of the movement sort of somehow makes more sense for some reason

it's a that game is a lot of fun but snowboarding let's not

let's stop talking about water yeah they're talking about frozen water snow yeah I

well done

We've talked about it before here, but the games that we, I think you and I really connected with were SSX and SSX tricky.

SSX was pretty much the only title worth playing at PlayStation 2 launch.

Part of the EA Sports big label.

Big.

I like the EA Sports Big.

It gets back to what we were saying about these games.

Sometimes part of the fun of them is them feeling arcadey.

Yes.

And for some reason, that sort of arcadey element seems to have been muted there.

Let my man do the worm on a fucking snowboard, please.

Let me play as a Yeti in an NBA street.

Yes.

Absolutely.

These games have such a great fun.

They were so colorful.

They had great soundtracks.

And those were the snowboarding games that hit.

Good sense of speed, too.

Really, really fun.

SSX 3 sort of was like, what if we went a little more like serious kind of?

Like it's not as fun as tricky because tricky is like, let's get crazy with it.

Yeah, I didn't play past Tricky.

3, I think, is a good game.

And it's a little more like technically,

like it looks nicer.

Yeah.

So there's like a a little more under the hood there, but at the expense of silly characters doing silly things and certainly no run DMC,

which is just, which is kind of interesting to think about, too, because that's the like only song in the game, if my memory serves.

Right.

And it's on a loop like the entire time you're playing it.

And you don't really get sick of it.

It's a good song.

It's kind of the ooh, banana of its era.

But also because it's SSX tricky and the song is tricky.

It's like, well, there you go.

You got it.

You reminded me of the game I'm playing.

What is this game called?

Thanks, Revron.

I really like those SSX games.

The other game I remember playing of this era, spending any time, like

a decent amount of time with, and I didn't own this game, but my friend had it for Nintendo 64, 1080 Snowboarding.

Yes.

And 1080 Snowboarding was fun.

All the racing games on Nintendo 64 suffered to some degree because there was just like, it felt like an upper limit on frame rate due to the hardware.

And just like,

you know, the sense of speed is such a part of a racer i guess there was i guess like you know at f-zero and um and episode one racer kind of like worked past that a little bit but episode one racer also required like a memory pack expansion to even uh you know hit that frame rate so

but but i i like i did like 1080 snowboarding i just was more connected with ssx which comes out a little bit later yeah i liked ssx a lot I didn't do 1080.

Yeah.

Because I didn't have a Nintendo 64.

We were at PlayStation House.

So I was Cool Boarders.

That's the thing.

So there was the Cool Boarders team, and there was also the Snowboard Kids faction.

The Snowboard Kids people are pretty vocal.

They're like, hey, Snowboard Kids, that's

where it was at.

It's like, okay, fucking calm down.

I believe you.

Snowboard kids, relax.

Yeah.

I loved Cool Borders, but it's kind of just like,

I feel like Cool, you play Cool Borders until something like SSX comes out, and then like SSX just like completely eats its lunch.

Yeah, for sure.

Also, like

when I was a kid, when SSX was out, you could kind of get away with saying

sex.

Yeah, I mean, if you wanted to be bad, if you go, well, yeah,

you're not going to say it, first of all, don't say it in front of somebody that's going to get you in trouble.

Like, you were talking to your friends, like, oofs, I said sex.

Yeah, I'm going right to the principal.

I'm overhearing that.

My earlobes getting stretched out on the way over there, I'll tell you that because I'm getting pulled down the halls.

Man, they used to be able to

just

teachers used to be able to just like hit you, I guess.

They did, yeah.

That's true.

Your adult's not here.

They're not here to hit you.

I guess I have to hit you.

Like, as far as games with dedicated boards,

I'm sort of tapped out here, but

I have two games to talk about here that aren't necessarily

board games, but games where you can ride a board.

Okay, I have a couple too.

I've a feeling we might have some overlap.

One that

I thought about, which we covered in our old format, Battle Toads.

Oh, yeah.

Which, of course, has the spaceboard sections where you're kind of like, you know, it's the continuous scrolling.

Yeah, that's right.

And

I also remembered there being hoverboards in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade,

or Turtles in Time, but I was looking it up because I couldn't find a specific instance of that.

They are in Shredder's Revenge, but I was like, but that's not what I was remembering.

I think it may be Mandela Effect it because of Battle Toads.

Yeah.

But yeah, Zits, Pimple, and Rash, of course, are right in those

boards.

And those levels are in a punishingly difficult game, those levels, like the cycling levels, are particularly difficult.

Yeah,

tough.

Gosh, their names are so nasty.

It's disgusting.

Is that correct?

Is it Zits, Pimple, and Rash?

I think so.

Yeah, yeah.

One of them is like eczema.

It's like, it's just, that's, it's unfortunate.

I just, I'm remembering in the Simpsons arcade game, you technically have a move where you're Bart and you do like a skateboard trick at an enemy.

That's right.

Yes, it's one of your attacks.

Which is really fun.

You know what?

I'm realizing there must have been, when Fantastic Four just came out, there must have been a Silver Surfer, playable Silver Surfer in some game.

There must be.

Perhaps in a Marvel Ultimate Alliance or something like that, maybe?

Yeah, that's what I'm wondering.

Yeah.

Or maybe in like one of the Marvel Capcoms.

Yeah.

Silver Surfer is a really cool character.

It looks cool.

Yeah,

and they're on a board, so it's pertinent to the discussion, actually.

In the video game Jack 2, you do get a hoverboard.

That you can sort of just like ride.

It's called a jet board, I guess.

But you can have one and you can sort of ride around on that.

And that's actually pretty cool.

Because that was like,

you know, in the same way that the second Prince of Persia is like.

This one's for fucking cool teenagers now.

Jack 2 is sort of like, this one's also like cool, actually.

Which I kind of wish they had done more in the Jack and Daxter style.

Right.

Because I like Jack 2.

I love Jack 2.

And I love Jack 3.

I think Jack 2 is probably my favorite.

Yeah.

But I wish that they would do maybe even like a reboot or like a

side story before getting from Jack 2

where they spend more time in that sort of colorful world because I really like that.

Right, because they quickly pivoted being kind of edge lords, the same sort of thing that Prince of Persia did with Warrior Within.

And then they're like in a dirty

city.

Yeah, and there's like cars,

flying cars.

But you get a jetboard in there, and that's really cool.

And I was like, really scratching my head, Nick, being like, what other games can you ride a board that it's like not the main thing?

Yeah, and it's kind of rare.

I'm sure there's other ones that I'm not thinking of.

No, that's the thing, and I'm sure our listeners will hit us up in the Discord if there's any we're omitting, but like, it's like I was like, Yeah, I was like, Oh, yeah, there's a bunch, and then it was like, oh, I was kind of going through my mental, uh, you know, archives and was having, I have trouble with memory recall these days as I'm old as shit, but like, I just like, I still could not, like, I was like, I don't know, I guess I can't place a lot of these as specifically as I thought, but one I do have is,

of course, the Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, where you can shield surf.

Oh, yes, yes.

And, well, first of all,

congratulations for remembering that.

You just looked proud of yourself.

You're like,

and you can do that.

It's very fun.

We're missing a big one from a game we're both currently playing.

You can like ground surf in Dr.

Kong Bonanza.

You can pick up a piece of the ground.

Yes.

And instead of throwing it, you can ride it around.

Right, yes.

And it's really cool.

Yeah.

And then while we're in Nintendo Town, this coming to me now, like, of course, in Super Mario 64, you can surf on the turtle shells.

Yes, that's right, yeah.

And this isn't, this is not really a board, man.

Why isn't there a board in Mario Kart?

That'd be really cool.

You can already ride on rails and stuff.

One of the characters that had a board you could ride.

Yeah, they should have a board, like Funky Kong, that'd be fine.

Funky Kong on a board instead of a car.

Pretty cool.

And then I think people might be talking about like, hey, what about

Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future?

There's no, you're not on boards.

You're on rollerblades.

You're on the board skates, you idiot.

They're two separate things.

A skateboard's one long thing.

What the fuck are you talking about?

You think we're talking about inline skating?

We're not talking about fucking rollerblading?

Not at all.

I'm so mad at this fucking made-up guy.

Yeah, yeah.

Hey, they didn't talk about.

They didn't talk about

Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX.

It's a fucking bike.

Do you not get it?

Do you not know what that is?

It's

bikes boards?

No, what I was going to ask is:

are inline skates

bikes?

Are they closer to bikes or skateboards?

I think they're more like bikes.

You can do stuff on them like skateboards, but it doesn't feel like a skateboard to me.

Ranch, I need help.

I'm scared.

I think you can sit.

I think they're bikes.

You think skates are bikes i think skates are closer to bikes than skateboards

i could be done

uh you also in in

are bikes are skates bikes we know that they're not boards they're not boards or they're not boards or they're not boards so in that way they are kind of the same thing because they're both not this one thing yes yeah

hmm But they're also attached to your body in a way a bike isn't.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't think they're bikes.

They're a third category.

Yeah, I think sort of.

Okay, so here's what it is: boards are boards.

Bikes are bikes.

And skates, here's the thing.

Skates are kind of shoes.

Skates are more like shoes.

Skates are actually more like shoes.

They're actually nothing like bikes, and they're actually very close to shoes.

They're more like shoes.

So much so that they have those shoes with the little wheel in them.

Heely's.

That's true.

Okay, so skates are shoes.

Skates are shoes.

Ice skates also shoes.

Those are bikes.

Should we do a segment?

I have one more to make.

In Death Stranding 2, you get a coffin board.

There's like a coffin that you get.

And then at one point, Tarman's like, yeah, we made it a fucking board or some shit.

I don't know.

That rocks.

And you can just ride it around.

It's not very practical, but it is

cool.

And it takes up a lot of space in the truck, actually.

And it's actually, it takes up too much space in the truck.

I've ditched so many thinking, you know what, maybe I won't.

I'll have the

truck, and then when I want to stop, and I'll like park the truck, I have a closer one, like a closer delivery.

I'll just ride the board, and it's never worth it.

I always end up like recycling the board.

I love it when a game includes something that's like intentionally cumbersome and inefficient, but it's just there because it's cool.

It's like you can do it if you want.

I will say too, it barely makes sense.

And this is a Kojima game.

I would go as far to say it's almost a bit of a stretch.

All right, let's do a segment.

It's our video game, Would You Rather, Would You Blathers,

Ape Edition.

That's right.

I'll read an either or involving games that involve apes in honor of Donkey Kong Bonanza.

You tell me your choice.

And Rochelle, feel free to chime in as well.

First up, would you Blathers,

assuming you're large in size,

have the ironic nickname Kitty like Kitty Kong or the unironic nickname Chunky like Chunky Kong?

You're a big person.

Yeah.

You're a big.

You're big.

Yeah.

You're big.

You're big.

Do you want to be called Kitty

or Chunky?

Would you Blathers?

Those are both pretty tough.

Yeah.

For almost like the same reason.

Because I feel, well, it stings a little less to be called Kitty, I guess.

You don't want to be infantilized as an adult.

No.

And I guess.

Well, he's not doing himself any favors with his like rattle and diaper and pacifier or whoever the fuck he's got in Dunk Kong Gun.

You know, there's something else going on with Kitty Kong, and that's okay.

Chunky Kong, if somebody, somebody, somebody could call you Chunky in a way that doesn't feel nice.

yeah, sure, right?

But there's also this sort of like, there's like a sweetness to it, too, or like if somebody close to you is like, just a little bit chunky, he's kind of like, yeah, I'm a little chunky, it's okay.

Uh, I think I would pick chunky, if I'm being honest, uh, Rochelle, what do you think?

Kitty or Chunky?

For some reason, kitty feels meaner.

Yeah, right.

And chunky is kind of a cute name, actually.

Yeah, chunky's kind of cute.

It makes me think a chunky hunky, which I, hey, I'd love to hear in that.

Yeah, yeah, no, no problems there.

I think I'd also go chunky Kong.

Yeah, I don't don't want to be Kitty Kong.

I don't want to be Kitty Kong.

You're talking about me being like, hey, I'm kidding.

There's something, yeah,

it just kind of feels like there's something else going on.

I don't like it.

All right, next up, Would You Blathers.

And now we're going from being large in size to old in age.

You're old.

Would you, Blathers,

have the nickname Cranky like Cranky Kong or

the nickname Wrinkly

like his dead wife wrinkly kong this is like i i do think wrinkly is so rude that is it is it's really mean it's so mean and to add insult to injury she's dead unexplained yeah dies between entries

cranky kong never gets closure i have a theory that it was just so because they figured out how to

like animate like a ghost and they just wanted to do it.

Yeah.

I got to pick Cranky because sometimes i am a little cranky yeah you sure are the hell

we'll talk about it later what the it's okay and

interesting i'd like to present you with a mirror good sir

rochelle cranky or wrinkly

same as matt wrinkly is so mean

because also like how wrinkly yeah wrinkly compared to what Here's where I'm going to zig where y'all zag.

I'm going to take wrinkly because

you already are cranky.

All right, hold on.

No, I think if someone's like, oh,

here comes Cranky, people are set up for uh-oh, this guy.

You know, like they're kind of preparing for the worst and they, they're, you're kind of going in on like, you know, like you're, you're, you're already in, in debt when you're going to this conversation.

You're already in the hole for a little bit.

You got to win people over and prove that you're not that cranky.

Or you just lean into it and you're just an asshole and no one wants to be around you.

I think if someone's like, hey, here comes Wray,

then you show up and their expectations are like, this person's gonna be wrinkly as fuck.

Yeah.

And I'll just be, and hopefully they'll see me and be like, you're not that wrinkly.

Not that wrinkly.

I like to call him that.

Yeah, exactly.

So that's why I'd take Wrinkly Kong in this case.

All right.

That's fair.

Next up, would you blathers have to catch a bunch of normal-sized monkeys on the loose using gadgets like in Ape Escape, or have to battle one kaiju-sized gorilla, like in Peter Jackson's King Kong, the official game of the movie.

A bunch of small monkeys or one big ape.

Here's the thing.

Yeah.

I love the ape escape monkeys.

Yeah.

They're going to make me look like a fucking idiot.

They're going to make me look so stupid.

Running around with little sirens on their head.

You're trying to catch up with a net.

And they're like spanking their ass at me.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll be humiliated.

At least if I pick King Kong, I'm going to die with dignity.

I'm not going to look like some fucking fool, you know what I mean?

And also, maybe it'll fall in love with me and hold me in its big hands.

That's the dream.

Yeah.

So I think

I'm going to pick King Kong.

Rochelle, normal-sized monkeys like in Ape Escape or giant gorilla like in Peter Jackson's King Kong, the official game of the movie.

Are they trying to hurt me?

They're just trying to get away.

Just think about this.

They're going to make you look so stupid.

Yeah,

but you're like, if you don't catch them, you're in trouble.

Yeah, they're trying to get away, you do have to catch them for some reason.

And I have gadgets, you have gadgets.

Yeah,

you're picking that one, yeah, yeah, gadgets are pretty cool.

I think I'm also gonna go after the ape escape monkeys because it seems fun.

I have never gotten to wield a big net, and I think I'd be pretty good at it.

Yeah, yeah, I think you would,

but also, I like, I don't think I'm dying.

No.

I think I'm up against King Kong, even if I've got the military backing me, you know, and they're blasting them with, you know,

you do have the military at your back.

Yeah.

I think I'm in trouble.

I just like King Kong.

I've also

great affection for that game.

I love the game.

And one of the all-time titles,

Peter Jackson's King Kong, colon, the official game of the movie.

Next up, would you Blathers have a guerrilla body but superhuman intelligence like Winston in Overwatch, or

have a human body but a dumb feral ape brain like Tomba and Tomba?

This is

because here's the thing: I've played, I played Tomba back in the day, me too, on PlayStation 1.

I've not played the remaster.

And this is what I got to say about Tomba.

Yeah.

I kind of don't like the way he looks.

I don't like him.

I like the game enough.

Yeah.

But as a character, I don't like him that much.

Yeah.

And I think he's.

I think he's a little too dumb to want to be him.

I do think it'd be fun to be a smart gorilla.

Do I get to wear like glasses?

Yeah, you do.

Winston has glasses.

Winston's got glasses?

That's pretty funny.

It's just kind of funny to think about because, like, what?

Ape go to regular doctor?

It's a good question.

I'm not sure if Ape go to regular doctor.

Does he wear clothes?

Yeah, he's got it.

He's got a

Winston before.

Let me bring up a shot of Winston.

Also, I think the name Winston is a good name.

It's a great name.

And I remember him from the Reveal trailer and being like, oh, this is cool.

What's this guy's whole deal?

And then I never played Overwatch.

It's a blind spot to me.

I have no idea what's going on in there at all.

Here's a shot of Winston in his power armor.

You can sort of get a sense of his whole deal.

There you go.

Yeah, 100%.

How could I not pick being Winston?

He looks awesome.

Yeah.

And also, like, being a big gorilla seems kind of cool.

You would certainly have gorilla strength combined with human smarts, and that would be

a powerful combo.

Rochelle, what do you think?

Do you want to be a smart ape or an ape-brained human?

I think that the dumber you are, the happier you are.

Yeah.

Ape-brain.

I have the same rationale, and that's why I'm going with Tombaugh.

I feel like Winston...

would be dealing with the existential angst of I'm the only one of my kind.

I do not exist in either the human world or the ape world.

Yeah, I am attracted to gorillas, but none of them can relate to me on an emotional level, you know, but my biology is driving me to mate with dumb gorillas.

Yeah, uh, and so, and then, like,

you know, human beings, like I don't feel like I fit in there either.

I'm a curiosity, you know what I mean?

Like, I'm not treated like an individual, I'm treated like the elephant man or something.

So, I think I would probably go with that.

And in this world, the elephant man is an elephant, actually.

Next up, would you blathers in the prehistoric fighting game Primal Rage, fight against Blizzard, the virtuous ape god who uses freezing breath and icy attacks, or fight against Chaos, the destructive ape god who uses gross out moves, including fart and vomit attacks?

So you got to go up against ice ape

or

shit and puke ape.

This is so hard, actually,

because I hate being cold so much.

I hate being cold.

Like too cold.

I want to be exactly as cold as I want to be.

Right.

Hey, chilling in the AC, that's great.

By the way, at a hotel,

I'm cranking the AC because it's not fucking mine.

I'm frigid in a hotel room.

My wife hates it.

She gets so mad.

I always turn it down to like

65.

Yeah, you got to find a compromise with your partner if you're on different temperatures.

But I like to be snuggled up in a blanket.

Oh, I get that.

I get that feeling.

And yeah, you're not paying for the electricity.

So go nuts.

Again, going back to the Airbnb thing, sometimes they'll put like a fucking thing over the thermostat to adjust it.

Ugh.

You know who's...

That's such a...

I stayed at an Airbnb once near an umbrella corporation property.

And they had all the...

the thermostats

locked up.

Sure.

But and I found a bunch of keys and none of them fit.

And then I did put it in one and I got to unlock it, and it did unlock it, and I got to change the thing, but then the key snapped in half.

Oh, boy.

And I had to find another one when I wanted to unlock it again.

Kind of cool you pulled it off, though.

You're kind of the master of unlocking.

I'm kind of the master of unlocking.

What do you think?

Ice Ape or Puke Ape?

I guess the Ice Ape because that seems more tolerable.

I'd rather be, I guess, covered in a bunch of snow than like shit and puke and stuff.

Yeah.

I'd hate that.

It's very funny, but I don't know.

It is funny.

I wouldn't like it.

Rochelle, what do you think?

Which ape do you want to take on?

Definitely, I think.

I'm going to go against the gross ape because he's a bad guy, so I know I'm on the right side.

Oh, and we're fighting a benevolent god.

Yeah, you're fighting a virtuous ape god.

The god of good.

And also, I just hate being cold.

And I think that guy's going to fucking freeze me to death.

I think I'm going to die, like, you know, just like I'm going to be a frozen block.

Yeah.

Whereas if I'm against chaos, I was like, oh, that's like this guy puked on me.

It's fucking disgusting.

I just smell this fucking fart, but I feel like I could maybe kick his ass.

I just feel like at some point, after being covered in

what I'm guessing would be a large amount of like puke and

shit, you're going to have just more problems after that.

Like, you're going to be

very sick.

Yeah, you might get some sort of infection.

Would you, Blathers, share a name with music producer accused of sex trafficking Diddy like Diddy Kong

or share a name with music producer accused of murder Phil Specter like Spectre from Ape Escape.

Diddy or Spectre?

God, it's unfortunate that I think one of these is worse.

And you might be surprised which.

No, no, no, no.

I guess if I have my drothers, I'd rather, and this is maybe me being a hero.

Yeah.

I guess I'd rather be Spectre from Ape Escape.

But that's just me.

Rochelle, what do you think?

You had to have an association with Diddy or Phil Spectre?

Unfortunately, I think Diddy is a cute name.

And yeah, you could take it back kind of.

Yeah, it's true.

I would also go with Spectre just because I feel like people's first thought would not be Phil Spectre.

Whereas I feel like if you're Diddy, like Diddy Kong, we were like, I like if I find Diddy, like that's the first thing they're thinking of.

You might get the only Diddies that exist.

You might get, oh, the fourth James Bond movie from the Daniel Craig part of the franchise

from Spectre, yes, of course.

The title of that.

Finally, would you, Blathers, be the OG cool sunglasses-wearing surfing gorilla like Thrilla Gorilla from TNC Surf Designs, or be the modern reboot of the sunglasses-wearing surfing gorilla, Funky Kong from Donkey Kong Country?

Thrilla Gorilla or Funky Kong?

I mean, I know you have great affection for Thrilla Gorilla, and I did say he was awesome.

Yeah, I'd be lying if I wasn't trying to live my life like I'm Funky Kong.

I have to pick Funky Kong.

Yeah.

Rochelle, what do you think?

Funky Kong is cool.

Look, I do love Thriller Gorilla.

I've got like he blazed a trail.

Yes.

We don't get to Funky Kong with Thriller Gorilla.

There's no way it's not Funky Kong.

No way.

Are you kidding me?

Also, like, Funky is so cool.

It's so cool, and he's got Funky Mode.

And like, I kind of feel like nobody really describes things as funky in like a good way anymore.

And I think Funky is like one of the cooler things you could be described as.

Like, oh, that guy's funky.

This fucking guy.

Yeah, hell yeah.

Oh, me?

I'm funky.

Low-key, kind of hot.

Yeah, he's great.

Don't get me started.

Hey, that's this week's Get Played.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen.

Ranch, yard underscore underscore sard, twitch.tv slash yard underscore underscore sard.

And of course, the D-Files, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Our music is by Ben Prunty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

Get Played Merch at kinshipgoods.com.

and also check out Get Animate or Sister Show over on Patreon.

Matt, what are we watching this week?

We're watching Birdie Wing Golf Girl Story, and I'm going to say, it's getting kind of interesting.

It's been interesting in the get-fugo as far as I'm concerned.

Check that out over at patreon.com slash get played.

And until then, you got played.

Whole.

That was a hit gum podcast.